Rock, Paper, Scissors Revisited

I wrote a piece here about Jeremy Wagstaff's article on using a paper notebook to replace a PDA or other things digital.

When digging around for background into on that post, I came across this great and funny exposition on why rock or paper or scissors should surely be the winner of the age old controversy and game by that name.

Check it out. With such reasoning, one must take paper very seriously ...

Paper is one of the single most important inventions ever; it has so many more uses than rocks and scissors combined. When Puff Daddy wrote "It's all about the Benjamins", d'you think he was referring to rocks or scissors? Hell no! He's talking about the most popular form of paper: money. It's been a long time since anyone used rocks to pay for anything, and they were abandoned for the lighter and more portable paper format; scissors aren't going to replace paper in this (or any) lifetime, continuing paper's dominance.

But wait ... maybe rock does rule?

The rock is truly man's best friend. Indeed human civilization and perhaps even humanity itself would not have ever developed if not for the rock. Our first invention, fire, came from banging rocks together. Our first weapons came from picking up the sharp rocks. Our first currency was the pretty shiny rocks. And of course man would never have had the chance to discover all the myriad uses of rocks if a big rock hadn't come along and wiped out all the dinosaurs for us. Even today mankind has continued to honor the rock for all it has done for us. Our music (Rock & Roll), our mythological heroes (Sergeant Rock, Rocky Balboa) and even the human sexual act (Rock the Casbah) have all been named to honor the mighty Rock. And no one less than the great Calvin himself has shown us that rocks are possessed of divine power when he described them as being "ballistic missiles from God."

Poor scissors ... all threat but no action I think:

No mother ever needed to tell her child not to run with paper or rocks. Scissors are dangerous--specifically to you and Brendan. Rock isn't: we live on a huge rock. The substance is positively benign to us. And paper? I can thump my dog with a thick paperback book, 800 pages, and she doesn't even notice. That's not dangerous.